CES: Three reasons why Ultra HDTV is a non-starter

UHDTV, designed to deliver video with four times the resolution of current HDTV will be hyped, dissected and debated at the CES this week.

LAS VEGAS – Are you hearing drumbeat of Ultra HDTV yet? I am. The question is whether this is “The Music Man” overture or a solo bongo player on a street corner in the East Village.

Seriously, this long developing "trend" has yet to reach full force. Nonetheless, the emerging technology designed to bring video in super high resolution with four times the pixels of current 1080p HDTV is the topic destined to be hyped, dissected and hotly debated at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

Sure, video on Ultra HDTV is nothing short of breathtaking. CES 2012 offered a taste of it at several booths, including Sharp and Sony.

Ultra HDTV, sometimes known as 4K x 2K, offers video in 3,840 × 2,160 pixels of resolution. The standard’s spec first released by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in 2007 also has been approved by ITU, with its UHDTV standard allowing 24, 25, 60 and 120 frames per second. The UHDTV video production systems -- including cameras and encoder systems – have been designed and developed. Some venues at the London Olympics last year were shot in UHDTV.

LG launched 84-inch UHDTV display last October in the U.S. market

LG Electronics launched U.S. sales late last year of the first LED-backlit LCD flat panel display – 84 whopping inches – at a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 for the also whopping price of $19,999. This ain’t Archie Bunker’s Philco!

Samsung also promised to roll out an 85-inch UHDTV at CES this week. LG already has a model on the market.

Expect to hear more from digital video chip companies like Broadcom and Ambarella, who will be showing off Ultra HDTV encode/decode ICs at CES this week.

Clearly, the chip industry’s pace in building an ecosystem around UHDTV has been picking up.

UHDTV is nevertheless still a non-starter for the following three reasons.

Form factor, political will and economics

If the history of the revolutionary shift from analog to digital TV is our guide, UHDTV lacks momentum in three areas: form-factor; political will; and pure economics.

First, the belated success of HDTV (or digital TV) owes a great deal to the eventual emergence of flat-panel TV. The industry’s push to HDTV piggybacked on the new sleek, flat form factor of LCDs and/or plasma displays, which consumers enthusiastically embraced.

To build excitement around a mammoth 84-inch UHDTV, the industry needs a true “video wall” – the kind portrayed in futuristic movies like “Fahrenheit 451” and “Back to the Future: 2.” Only a universal form factor change can justify this sort of rumpus-room upheaval.

Second, HDTV in the 1980’s got a huge boost when the U.S. TV broadcast industry – wanting to secure extra bandwidth within the limited wireless airwaves – lobbied Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to define "digital" TV (invented by a U.S. company, General Instruments) as a key U.S.-vs.-Japan competitiveness issue. The original analog HDTV system called Hi-Vision was invented by NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster.

Several U.S. companies – initially competing among themselves to be a winner of the U.S. HDTV system – joined forces to forge a consortium called the “Grand Alliance,” which eventually developed the U.S. HDTV standard. Both the broadcast industry and Grand Alliance became the indispensable forces behind the U.S. transition to digital TV.

UHDTV, developed again by NHK, is almost certainly being promoted as the enhanced standard within Japan. But in the U.S., UHDTV has no Grand Alliance, nor any other major interest group to exert the political pressure needed for broad adoption.

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Cookie Jar, I love the "You gotta have something to do with all that computing power besides write terribly inefficient code." comment! I found myself agreeing with most of the comments about price vs acceptance. I would love higher resolution and higher bandwidth (from my cable) but currently cost is my limiting factor. Once the cost comes down then people will begin to move towards it. I still remember the first few days after switching from the old modem to cable modems; it seemed that the internet pages just blasted their way onto the monitor! Now I find myself fustrated with "how slow" the internet connection is, funny how quickly we adjust our metrics!

You could bypass the cable system and get over the air broadcasts. Just about every multiplex has their main channel in HD. If you have Verizon FiOS as an option, I believe they offer HD at no extra cost.
I use over the air and Internet TV exclusively. So HD is a staple diet for me, for any over the air broadcasts. No cost, other than buying the TV set, of course.
ATSC did it right in this respect. Receiving the HD stream was a mandate for all receivers, whether or not they were capable of actually displaying HD. This avoids having to waste bandwidth transmitting two copies of the same program.
IMO, to introduce UHDTV, a good approach would be to replace HD with UHD streams, taking up the same b/s as the HD stream (via H.265 compression). And then make that stream also available as SD-only, for some relatively short transitional period.
At the end of the transitional period, those who do not have a UHD-capable set would be able to buy a STB to convert UHD streams to HD or SD. This would then free up spectrum again, for more programs.
The end result would be the same number of channels available then as now.

I would point out that in many places, including my town, cable is the only decent way to get video content and HD costs lots extra. You can get 100 channels of SDTV, or you can triple the cost by adding a few channels of HD. I believe that most people still watch SDTV. It isn't because they can't tell the difference, it is because the difference isn't worth the cost.

Are there statistics showing HDTV owners watch mostly SDTV? That certainly isn't the case in my household. In fact, out of the 2 dozen or so shows scheduled on my DVR I can only think of one that is in standard definition, and that's because there is no HD equivilent.

More and more movies are being shot in 4K and more and more theaters have 4K projection equipment. So the content, at least as far as movies are concerned, is in the can already. 4K captured many events at the London Olympics. So the equipment and technology exists.
Even for amateur videographers, most DSLR image capturing hardware is quite capable of 4K video. It's just a matter of updating the processors in them. As we all know the price of processors keeps falling. You gotta have something to do with all that computing power besides write terribly inefficient code.
Apple's iPad certainly showed the feasibility of resolution greater than HD in a mass product. A lot of people jumped on that bandwagon.
The industry needs an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs to make the public gotta have one.

I loved reading this article. Very well written even though I don't entirely agree with it's premise. Like all technology price will come down. Upconversion will help the lack of content issue. And as you said, manufacturers need high end technology to improve their margins. 4K won't be for everyone but I think it will eventually be cheap enough to go mainstream for home theater enthusiasts.

"Ambarella, Inc., predicted that 4K content materials may become first available on the Internet"
Considering a lot of people still struggle to get sufficient bandwidth to stream video content online I think it's going to be a long time before the masses can deal with even 4K file downloads for home viewing. The first 4K movie for download was 160gb, would hate to see how big the first Ultra HDTV releases are going to be, but they'll sure be hogging your broadband for a fair few days, even on the fastest connections.